share

SOFTWARE: Crunching Gene Chips

By scrutinizing data from DNA chips that record the activity of multiple genes, molecular biologists hope to pinpoint which genes collaborate to operate a cell in sickness and in health. A new program called CAGED, available from this Web site, makes it easier to analyze data from these microarrays. Marco Ramoni, a computer scientist at Harvard, and colleagues crafted the program to analyze repeated gene expression measurements from, say, the same patient or cell line. Time series such as these confound traditional methods such as correlation because the values aren't independent, Ramoni says. Academic and nonprofit users can download CAGED for free.